Musicology Calendar - Past Events for this Academic Year

Dept. of Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series: Sue-Ellen Case

This event takes place on Thursday, November 3, at 5:00pm, in room 1344 Schoenberg Music Building.

The talk will be derived from Prof. Sue-Ellen Case’s newly completed manuscript, From Alchemy to Avatar: Performing Science and the Virtual. Although this book covers several centuries and many forms of performance, Prof. Case will sample only a few sections. She will begin by summarizing her basic argument that rests on the bipolarity between alchemy and the “new” science. From alchemy, she will include a section from “mid-century modern” which includes nationalist uses of cryptography, decoder rings, and UFO sightings. From the discussion of avatars, she will include the section on synth-race and Sun Ra.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact lesadieux@hotmail.com; hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

"A Yearning for Eternity," Voxfire in Concert

Voxfire is a collaboration of three of the West Coast’s most highly regarded interpreters of early and contemporary vocal music, who are adapting and presenting the works of these eras with their own distinctive musical style and dramatic flair. Working alone as well as with some of the most prominent instrumental specialists of today, they have performed music from medieval luminaries such as Hildegard, Machaut, and Landini through the Italian Baroque masters, such as Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi, to works by modern-era composers as varied as Benjamin Britten and Steve Reich. Voxfire’s recent CD, “Songs to the Virgin,” has been widely acclaimed. See Voxfire’s website at http://www.voxfire.org for more information.

Advance registration not required. No fee. Seats available on a first-come, first-served basis. Parking permits may be purchased ($8) from a UCLA Parking Services kiosk. This program is presented by the UCLA Sounds Early Music Series of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. For more information, call 310-825-1880 or e-mail cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.

-- submitted by Karen Burgess (cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu)

Dept. of Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series: Prof. Carol J. Oja

Leonard Bernstein in the Early 1950s: Theater, Genre, Cultural Critique

In the early 1950s, leading up to West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein entered the most productive phase of his entire compositional career. This paper will explore the two earliest shows from that period—Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and Wonderful Town (1953)—in terms of the multilayered questions they raise. Both works challenged the dividing line between “opera” and “musical theater.” Both dealt with pressing social and cultural issues of the day. And both were affected by McCarthy era politics. Performance venues and audience will be considered alongside musical style and cultural context.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (webcalendar@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact lesadieux@hotmail.com; hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

Tropics of Glory: Doxology and Invention in Premodern England

This paper will explore the aesthetics and implications of "troping" in the musical and literary practices of medieval England. Drawing on an array of liturgical, poetic, and dramatic works from the period of the Benedictine Reform (circa 1000) through the early years of the Reformation, the discussion will focus on a series of formal and institutional relationships between and among a variety of cultural formations: liturgy and authorship, latinity and vernacularity, musical notation and rhetorical organicism, and so on. The paper derives from several parts of a long-term book project tentatively called The Work of God: Liturgical Culture and Vernacular Writing in England, 650-1550.

-- submitted by Stacey Rosborough (humnet\stacey@humanities.ucla.edu)

"Tropics of Glory: Doxology and Invention in Premodern England"

Advance registration not required. No fee. Seating is limited; seats available on a first-come, first-served basis.

-- submitted by Brett Landenberger (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact lesadieux@hotmail.com

Musicology Event

"Music 'pushed to the edge of existence' (Adorno, Listening, & the Question of Hope)"

FRIDAY, APRIL 7, 4 PM, ROOM 1230 (GREEN ROOM) SCHOENBERG MUSIC BUILDING

Abstract:

Philosopher/aesthetician and musician/musicologist/composer Theodor W. Adorno is commonly (if carelessly) charged with unrelenting pessimism; yet at the very heart of his sustained and often bitter critique of late modernity there lies fundamental hopefulness, if not precisely optimism, conceived within the context of art’s role—music especially—in providing the wherewithal to imagine social utopia.

Taking account Adorno's philosophy of music, Ernst Bloch's philosophy of utopia, and Roland Barthes' theory of listening, this paper's principal claim is that music is the Other of the non-music and the anti-music of social relations. Music registers itself as a difference, as it were, as an alternative, to non-musical life—non-musical life meant both as neutral fact of existence and as a dystopian reality in which music is, in ironic actuality, today virtually inescapable. In brief, music posits the sonoric possibility of something better.

-- submitted by (jenny@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

Musicology Event

-- submitted by (jenny@humanities.ucla.edu)

"The Legacy of Rosina Lhevinne" (2003): Documentary Film

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 4 pm, 1344 Schoenberg Music Building

This award-winning documentary film by Professor Salome Ramras Arkatov offers an intimate portrait of the life and achievements of the legendary pianist and master-teacher Rosina Lhevinne. The film includes audio recordings of Mme Lhevinne's oral history and her speeches, intimate interviews with her illustrious students John Browning, Van Cliburn, Misha Dichter, Janet Guggenheim, her colleagues Arthur Rubinstein, Nicolas Slonimsky, Robert Mann, and her daughter Marianna Lhevinne Graham.

Professor Salome Arkatov will be present for the discussion of the film.

Co-sponsored by the Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

The Making of Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder

Thursday, April 27, 4 pm, in 1230 Schoenberg Music Building (the Green Room). All are welcome and a reception will follow. Please see his abstract below.

The Making of Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder: Applied Musicology and Citizenship

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books reference 126 songs and thus constitute one of the best and most detailed memoirs of music-making in 19th-century American families and lives. Her uses of music and music-making give essential shape to the narratives and add depth and meaning. Professor Cockrell explores musical memoir-making and the role that music plays in these immensely popular and influential books.

More than just an exercise in academic understanding, Professor Cockrell has recently snuck out of the Ivory Tower and incorporated his own record label. In Nashville, Tennessee no less. And has begun producing “scholarly informed” recordings of the old music from “The Ingalls- Wilder Family Songbook” made to sound fresh and new. Pa’s Fiddle Recordings, LLC, hopes to enable readers young and old to re-hear the music inscribed into the narratives and revive a living regard for many of the nation’s musical treasures.

Laying musicological rubber on the road has prompted further reflections on the responsibility of the citizen musicologist to the public sphere, to the future of the discipline, and to the means for fuller life-actualization through music-understanding and music-making.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact lesadieux@hotmail.com; hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

CDH Roundtable Meeting-Prof. Knapp/Musicology

CDH Roundtable Meeting with Prof. Raymond Knapp, Musicology

-- submitted by Kathy Forero (kforero@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, see http://www.musicology.ucla.edu/

Distinguished Lecture Series: Daniel Goldmark

Monday, May 1, 6:30pm, in 1440 Schoenberg Music Bldg.

Abstract below:

"Stuttering in American Popular Song, 1890-1930”

At the height of its commercial popularity, Tin Pan Alley manufactured thousands of songs yearly on every conceivable subject. The historical importance of the sheet music for this repertoire lies in part in the information about social issues reflected in the subjects chosen for songs and their lyrics. Songs about Prohibition, World War I, city life, and even new clothing fads were common fodder for songwriters and today give us humorous and often remarkably perceptive viewpoints about cultural trends. A surprising number of songs from this period include disability—most notably stuttering— among their subject matter. In this paper I explore the formulaic narratives told by Tin Pan Alley to show how people who stutter were portrayed, and examine the stories being told about people with disabilities in general. The conceptual gap between the stories of people who stutter and realities about life for disabled people in early twentieth century America establishes that these songs have little to do with disabilities per se, and more about the social anxieties. Through the mocking scenarios set up in these songs, disabled people are subjected to the same socio-cultural segregation that discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity—all the various discourses of otherness—face.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact lesadieux@hotmail.com; hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

Stevenson Lecture Series presents Joseph Kerman

Thursday, May 4 at 4:00pm, Popper Hall (room 1200), in the Schoenberg Music Buidling. A reception will follow immediately on the south wing patio.

Professor Kerman's talk will be on: William Byrd: Catholic and Careerist

The composer William Byrd was an outspoken Catholic at the Protestant court of Queen Elizabeth, and a man of greatest political skill and audacity. Far from being silenced, he found ways both practical and artistic to support the dissident (recusant) cause. His music towered above that of any of his compatriots, but it was only through multiple determined negotiations that Byrd achieved his unique position: Icon of his own Catholic community, and acknowledged ornament to his Protestant nation.

Joseph Kerman’s main work as a musicologist is on Byrd and Elizabethan music and on Beethoven. An influential commentator on musicology (Contemplating Music, 1986), he was an early champion of criticism within the discipline. He was founding co-editor of 19th Century Music in 1977 and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1997 (Concerto Conversations, 1999). His latest book is The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750 (2005), his best-known Opera as Drama (1956), and his most important Listen (1972–), a college textbook. Kerman has been writing for the New York Review of Books since 1977.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

Distinguished Lecture Series: Prof. Robert Stevenson, "John Cage's West Coast Career"

Thursday, May 11 4:00 PM Schoenberg Music Bldg, room 1230 (Green Room)

Reception to Follow

"John Cage's West Coast Career"

John Cage (1912-1992), the most renowned musician born in Los Angeles, and the most influential American composer of his century, profited enormously from his years both in Los Angeles and his biennium in Seattle, before his departure from the west coast in the fall of 1940.

Stevenson, author of the first and to the present sole closely documented account of Cage’s fledgling years, buttresses his presentation with a keen knowledge of Los Angeles music history, having published in all the chief encyclopedias the Los Angeles city article.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact lesadieux@hotmail.com; hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

"Tales, Poems, and Bawdy Songs: Folkloric Imagination in the North"

9:00 Introduction: Prof. Joseph Nagy Opening Remarks: Prof. Mary Kay Norseng

9:30 - 10: 30 Paper Session One: The Medieval Folkloric Imagination

9:30 - 10:00 Prof. John Lindow, UC Berkeley. "The ghost with the ax and the dreamer with the sword: Kumlbúa tháttr and medieval Icelandic legend"

10:00-10:30 Prof. Judy Quinn, Cambridge University. "The tenacity of the valkyrie fantasy in Old Norse poetry"

10:30-11:00 Coffee

11:00 -12:30 Paper Session Two: Archaeology of the Folkloric Imagination

11:00-11:30 Prof. Johanna Domokos, UCLA. "Harald Gaski mapping Andres Fjellner mapping Saami Epos mapping... A Case of Saami Literary Archaeology"

11:30 -12:00 Prof. Karin Sanders, UC Berkeley. "Hans Christian Andersen's Archaeological Imagination"

12:00-12:30 Questions

12:30-2:00 Lunch break

2:00-3:30 Paper Session Three: Intersections: Music, Philosophy and the Folkloric Imagination

2:00-2:30 Sir Niels Ingwersen, Univ. of Wisconsin. "Endless Stories without Endings: Kierkegaard and Folklore"

2:30-3:00 Prof. Bertil Van Boer, Western Washington University. "Milk Maids, Tryptichs, and Voices Beyond the Grave: The "Unsung" Collaborations between Carl Michael Bellman and Joseph Martin Kraus"

3:00-3:30 Coffee

3:30-5:00 Paper Session Four: Politics and the Folkloric Imagination

3:30-4:00 Prof. Timothy R. Tangherlini, UCLA. " 'And the wagon came rolling in': Legend and (Self)-Censorship in 19th Century Denmark"

4:00-4:30 Prof. Tracey Sands, Univ. of Colorado. "Saints, Salvation, and Reformation: Some Observations on Scandinavian Legendary Ballad Tradition"

-- submitted by Brett Landenberger (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

"Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and the Queer Single Girl in 1960s Musicals"

Professor Stacy Wolf, Dept. of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas, Austin

Friday, May 26th, 4:00pm Schoenberg 1440

“Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and the Queer Single Girl in 1960s Musicals”

In “Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and the Queer Single Girl in 1960s Musicals,” Stacy Wolf explores contradictory representations of gender and sexuality in the inimitable characters of Sally Bowles and Charity Hope Valentine. Interweaving cultural history, a feminist, queer reading of the musicals, visual images, sound and film clips, and autobiography, Wolf considers these characters within the conventions of mid-twentieth century musicals, in relation to the 1960s popular culture image of the Single Girl, and as performed on stage and on film.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

Pro-Tools talk/Musicology Dept. Award Ceremony

When: Thursday, June 1, 4:00pm

Where: 1344 Schoenberg, with reception in 1230 Schoenberg

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu

Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series: Elijah Wald

presents a talk by

Elijah Wald Musician, Writer, Visiting UCLA Professor

“Strange Bedfellows: Louis Armstrong Loves Guy Lombardo and the Mexican Corrido Meets Gangsta Rap”

Genre boundaries help us find music we like and write cohesive histories, but they also can blind us to the complexities of both music and history.

Louis Armstrong often referred to Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians as his favorite band, but like Muddy Waters's affection for Gene Autry, this fact is rarely cited and almost never pursued. Critics and historians who celebrate African-American music tend to dismiss Lombardo's music as boring, mainstream pap, unworthy to be treated alongside the masterpieces of Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Thus, while celebrating Armstrong, they ignore his musical opinion---and that of the public that made Lombardo's orchestra the most popular dance band not only of white America, but also at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. How have such prejudices affected our views of the past? How has our understanding of black musicians been limited by an insistence that they fit modern definitions of hipness or authenticity? And if Louis Armstrong was the greatest single figure in jazz and his favorite band was the Royal Canadians, then is the appreciation of Lombardo a necessity for anyone who wants to understand American music?

More recently, young Mexican Americans inspired by the martyred smuggler and singer Chalino Sánchez rediscovered the power of the classic corrido, an epic song form with roots in Medieval ballads. In California, some listeners who had grown up with Snoop Dogg and Eazy-E embraced the corrido as their own gangsta rap, and by the late 1990s a few were contemplating a fusion of the forms. Jesse Morales, who had grown up in South Central LA, donned cowboy duds and sang corridos as “El Original de la Sierra,” then shaved his head and began referring to himself as “O.G.” Underground groups like Los Traficantes were followed by the million-selling Akwid, and marketers coined terms like “banda rap” and “urban regional” in an attempt to capture one of American music's most daring fusions: Central European polka, classic border balladry, and the toughest urban beats. “Neither from here nor from there” in the words of one of the biggest banda rap hits, this could be the soundtrack of modern Los Angeles and a signpost to the future of American music.

Thursday, October 12th at 5pm 1230 Schoenberg Music Building (“Green Room”) Tapas Themed Reception to Follow

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu; jbissett@ucla.edu

Musical Theater and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain and America

Sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the UCLA International Institute, the UCLA Council on Research and the UCLA Department of Musicology

Mirror-like, the musical theater of the Spanish and South American eighteenth century reflects the complexity and resourcefulness of the interlocking societies in which it thrived. As the old roles—nobility and commoner, colonizer and colonized—shifted and radically reconfigured themselves, new notions of human identity arose, finding myriad representations in the unstable signifiers of music-theatrical meaning.

Scholars from Spain and North America will convene for two days to examine and discuss the musical theater of the ‘Siglo de luces’ on both sides of the Atlantic, rich in genres both serious and comic: opera, zarzuela, intermedio, villancico, and tonadilla. The conference will include a performance of a 1779 tonadilla by Blas de Laserna, Las músicas.

Registration Deadline: October 20, 2006

Registration Fees: $25 per person; UC faculty & staff, students with ID: no charge* *Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable and apply to full or partial attendance.

Lunch and other refreshments are provided to all registrants.

Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration closes when capacity is reached. No confirmation will be sent, but we will contact you if we receive your registration after we reach capacity.

Program Schedule:

Friday, October 27

10:00 A.M. Welcoming Remarks Peter H. Reill, UCLA

Comic Music Drama I Chair: Susana Hernández Aracio, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Álvaro Torrente, Universidad Complutense de Madrid/Royal Holloway, University of London "Italian Intermezzi in the Spanish Court under Farinelli"

Raymond Knapp, UCLA "Cervantes, Voltaire, and the Reflexive Idealism of the American Musical"

José-Máximo Leza, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain "Elusive Identities: Italian Comic Opera meets ‘Zarzuela’ in Eighteenth-Century Madrid"

12:30 P.M. Lunch

2:00 P.M. Serious Music Drama Chair: Louise Stein, University of Michigan

Craig Russell, California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo "Sumaya’s 'Partenope' (1711): Mexican Theatricality and European Inspiration"

Bernardo Illari, University of North Texas "Cuzco’s New Glory: Opera and the Criollo Identities in Colonial Peru"

William John Summers, Dartmouth College "Role Playing or Playing the Role in Historic Manila: Spanish and 'Filipino' Dramatic Events in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"

4:30 P.M. Reception

Saturday, October 28

10:00 A.M. Comic Music Drama II Chair: Elisabeth Le Guin, UCLA

John Koegel, California State University, Fullerton "Musical Theater in Nineteenth-Century Mexico"

Germán Labrador López de Azcona, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid "Musical Hybridization and Musical Identity in Eighteenth-Century Comic Theater"

Margaret Cayward, University of California, Davis "The Spanish Tonadilla and Musical Life in Mission-Era California"

12.30 P.M. Lunch

2:00 P.M. Audience Workshop and Performance

Blas de Laserna (1751-1816) Tonadilla a solo, “Las músicas,” 1779? Director: Elisabeth Le Guin, UCLA Soprano: Pamela Murray

3:15 P.M. Roundtable Discussion Moderator: Elisabeth Le Guin, UCLA

-- submitted by Mark Pokorski (mpok@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, see http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/c1718cs/calendar.htm#oct27

Musicology DLS: David Brodbeck

November 9, 5:00pm, room 1344 Schoenberg Music Building (Reception immediately following)

“Was ist deutsch?” Dvořák’s Reception in Liberal Vienna Professor David Brodbeck, UC Irvine

Antonín Dvořák emerged into public consciousness in Vienna in late 1879, at a time of crisis within multinational Austria’s German-speaking bourgeoisie. The German Liberals had recently fallen from power in the central government and were replaced by a coalition dominated by clerical, conservative, and Slavic parties. This sudden change in fortune initiated a gradual transformation in liberal ideology. Although the liberals’ nationalist project had traditionally been of the “civic,” not “ethnic” variety, with a German liberal identity theoretically available to persons of any ethnicity who professed Bildung and Deutschtum, many increasingly adopted a particularist project of German nationalism, involving a decided defense of Nationalbesitzstand (national property). A comparative reading of Dvořák’s reception among Viennese critics during the last decades of the nineteenth century suggests that much of what was seen to be at stake in the Czech composer’s music was what did and did not count as “German.” Whereas Eduard Hanslick, critic for the Neue Freie Presse, consistently upheld traditional liberal ideology on this question, Theodor Helm’s criticism in the Deutsche Zeitung stood more in line with the newer German- nationalist project. More than that, throughout his writings on Dvořák the younger critic seemed very much aware of acting the part of German-nationalist counterbalance to the more traditional liberal-nationalist Hanslick. Whereas Hanslick was the more powerful figure among the liberal elite, in many ways by the 1890s Helm had come to be more representative of the broader segment of Vienna’s educated and semi-educated middle classes.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu, jbissett@ucla.edu

Musicology DLS: Todd Decker

November 30, 5:00pm, room 1420 Schoenberg Music Building, Reception immediately following in 1230 Schoenberg (Green Room).

"Black / White Encounters on the American Musical Stage and Screen," Todd Decker

Abstract: What happens when black and white performers playing black and white characters share a song or a dance in a musical narrative on stage or screen? Such interracial performances—what I call black / white encounters—are remarkably rare occurrences on the American musical stage and screen, where all white, all black, or self-consciously color-blind casts have predominated. I will discuss three examples of black / white encounter, drawn in turn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the American opera stage, and consider what these exceptional moments reveal about the changing practical and expressive limits on interracial performance in musical-dramatic genres. My examples include the 1927 stage musical Show Boat; selected film and television performances by Fred Astaire from the 1930s to the 1960s; and the opera Margaret Garner, premiered by Michigan Opera Theater in May 2005, with music by Richard Danielpour to a libretto by novelist Toni Morrison.

-- submitted by Hannah Huang (hhuang@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact hhuang@humnet.ucla.edu, jbissett@ucla.edu

UCLA MUSICOLOGY DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

presents talks by

Phil Gentry

“Secret Loves: The Orioles, the Moonglows, and Doris Day”

The post-WWII tradition of Africa-American vocal harmony gives us a complex portrait of music-making at a particularly tumultuous political moment. Although emerging from a distinctly African-American tradition, these groups were also influenced by the music of dominant white culture as well. Tin Pan Alley standards provided the basis for much of the vocal harmony repertoire; for example, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was recorded by no less than thirty-five different vocal harmony groups. This paper will examine the life of one particular popular standard, the Doris Day vehicle “Secret Love,” in versions by both the Orioles and the Moonglows, each released in 1954.

Stephanie Vander Wel

“Chewing Chawing Gum”: Lulu Belle and the National Barn Dance

In 1932, Lulu Belle presented the first enactment of the female hillbilly of WLS’s National Barn Dance in Chicago. Unraveling the ways in which Lulu Belle’s persona parodied mountain culture through notions of gender and class, I analyze her performances and publicity in WLS’s fanzines. Her rendition of “Chewing Chawing Gum” relied on the musical soundscape of Southern Appalachia to assert female agency while critiquing domestic gender roles. Though WLS’s promotional material of Lulu Belle attempted to mitigate her bold portrayal, Lulu Belle became one of most popular women in radio through her commanding depictions of a hillbilly.

Thursday, February 22nd at 4pm 1420 Schoenberg Music Building

-- submitted by Jenny (jenny@humanities.ucla.edu)